LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 014 741 2 




AND THE TRANSMISSION OF ENGLISH 
POWER IN NORTH AMERICA. 



2ln 2llitircss 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 



New York Historical Society 



ON ITS 



NINE TY-SECO ND A NNIVERSA R Y, 
Wednesday, November i8, 1896, 



I^USTIN WINSOR, LL.D. 




NEW YORK : 

PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1896. 



c 



CABOT AND THE TRANSMISSION OF ENGLISH 
POWER IN NORTH AMERICA. 



An Address 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE 

New York Historical Society 

ON ITS 

NINETY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY, 
Wednesday, November i8, 1896, 



JUSTIN WINSOR, LL.D. 




NEW YORK: 

PRINTED FOR THE SOCIETY. 

1896. 



\c. 189T <;;^ 






Officers of the Society, 1896. 



PRESIDENT, 

JOHN ALSOP king. 

FIRST VICE-PRESIDENT, 

J. PIERPONT MORGAN. 

SECOND VICE-PRESIDENT, 

JOHN S-. KEN N E D Y . 

FOREIGN CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

REV. EUGENE A. HOFFMAN, D.D 

DOMESTIC CORRESPONDING SECRETARY, 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY. 

RECORDING SECRETARY, 

ANDREW WARNER. 

TREASURER, 

ROBERT SCHELL. 

LIBRARIAN, 

WILLIAM KELBY. 



EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE. 



FIRST CLASS FOR ONE YEAR, ENDING 1 897. 

JOHN A. WEEKES, J. PIERPONT MORGAN. 

SECOND CLASS — FOR TWO YEARS, ENDING 1 898. 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY, DANIEL PARISH, Jr., 

FRANCIS TOMES. 

THIRD CLASS FOR THREE YEARS, ENDING 1 899. 

frederic gallatin, isaac j. greenwood, 

charlp:s howland russell. 

FOURTH CLASS FOR FOUR YEARS, ENDING I900. 

JOHN S, KENNEDY, GEORGE W. VANDERBILT, 

CHARLES ISHAM. 

EDWARD F. DE LANCEY, Chairman, 
DANIEL PARISH, Jr., Secretary. 

[The President, Recording Secretary, Treasurer, and Librarian 
are members, ex-officio, of the Executive Committee.] 



PROCEEDINGS. 

At a meeting of the New York Historical Society, held in 
its Hall, on Wednesday evening, November i8, 1896, to celebrate 
the Ninety-second Anniversary of the Founding of the Society : 

The proceedings were opened with prayer by the Very Reverend 
Eugene A. Hoffman, D.D., Dean of the General Theological Semi- 
nary. 

The President made some remarks on the history, progress, and 
wants of the Society. 

The Anniversary Address was then delivered by Justin Winsor, 
LL.D., of Harvard University, on " Cabot and the Transmission of 
English Power in North America." 

On its conclusion, the Rev. B. F. De Costa, D.D., with remarks, 
submitted the following resolution which was adopted unanimously : 

Resolved, That the thanks of the Society be presented to Justin 
Winsor, LL.D., for the eloquent and learned address which he has 
delivered this evening, and that he be requested to furnish a copy 
for publication. 

A benediction was then pronounced by Dean Hoffman. 

The Society then adjourned. 

Extract from the Minutes ; 

Andrew Warner, 

Recording Secretary. 



CABOT AND THE TRANSMISSION 

OF ENGLISH POWER IN 

NORTH AMERICA. 



Go back, if you please, to a tropical night in 
October a little over four hundred years ago. The 
Great Discoverer stands on his deck, and the goal 
he was seeking is before him. A rising moon at 
his back lies glimmering on a sandy shore in front. 
Perhaps what he saw was the Asiatic main. Per- 
haps it was one of the thousands of islands which 
Marco Polo had told the European world lay off 
that shore of the Orient which looked toward the 
rising sun. 

From the time when, upon the return of Colum- 
bus, Peter Martyr questioned if the Asiatic coast 
had really been touched, down to the failure of the 
Admiral on his fourth voyage to find a passage 
throueh the land of Veraeua, the cunningf cosmog-- 
raphers of Europe had played fast and loose with 
the notions that what had been found was really a 
New World, or the Old World approached in a 
new way. On his second voyage, Columbus, loath 
to recognize what others saw, found more than 
half of his companions better informed than him- 



8 Cabot and the TraiisniissioJi of 

self. The Asiatic main had not, as he claimed, 
been found in the insular Cuba. It has recently 
been proved, where earlier it was a necessary de- 
duction, that Columbus, on his last voyage, or to 
be more precise, that his brother Bartholomew, as 
is shown in a remarkable map which Professor 
Wieser has reproduced, was convinced that a 
stretch of ocean lay beyond the Isthmus, where 
Balboa later saw it. The way was thus made 
clear in 1505 either to reach the Red Sea and the 
Mediterranean, or to round the Cape of Good 
Hope, on the track to western Europe, if only a 
strait be found in the tropics, as Magellan nearly a 
score of years later was to find one at the south. 

While this development was going on in the belt 
of the Antilles, a new experience was bringing 
into correlation with the solution in the south the 
geographical mystery of the north. This new dis- 
closure was the fruition, under the new passion, 
of numerous ventures, which the hardy west-coun- 
try English seamen had made to discover and sail 
beyond the long-sought island of Bresil. So it 
was that not long after daybreak, on a summer's 
day, in a northern latitude, in 1497, less than a 
score of daring adventurers, on board a little ship 
called the Matthew, a mere cock-boat in our mod- 
ern eyes (which for some weeks had been buffeting 
the sea, with an average speed of forty or fifty 
miles a day), espied a land which in its transient 
summer verdure appeared more pleasing than it 



English Poiver in North America. 9 

really was. They supposed it to be the Asiatic 
coast in a hiorh latitude. 

It did not matter to that scant company/ and it 
doe's not matter to us, whether the shore seen in 
that crisp morning' hour was the shore of some 
coast-island or the mainland. In conductinor an 
expedition, as Henry the Seventh said, " in our 
name and by our commandment," it is enough that 
by what he saw, John Cabot then created for a 
power that discredited the Bull of Demarcation a 
claim to a share in this Occidental-Orient, what- 
ever it might prove to be. 

These two revelations of an hour emero;inor from 
the night, one in the north and the other in the 
south, within five years of each other, were to de- 
termine that a people, predominantly English in 
spirit if not in blood, now holds the broad areas of 
this northern continent, while the lesser southern 
spaces have been yielded for the most part to a 
Latin race. 

It is by no means certain that the initial contact 
developed for the northern discoverer any part of 
the main coast. We know that Columbus did not 
see it in the tropics. It depends upon the spot — 
and this is in dispute — where we place the landfall 
of Cabot in the north, whether we allow him 
then to have looked upon the mainland. There 
can be no question, however, with the cautious 
and circumspect historian, that the Genoese and 
the Venetian-Bristolese had the essential priority 



lO Cabot and the Transmission of 

in the discovery of the upper and lower regions of 
the North American Continent. 

To dispute the precedence of Cabot, there has 
been advanced the claim of '\^espucius to a voyage 
in 1497. It was discredited at the time, and is not 
proven now. Spain and England then, the foster- 
parents of this western world, owed their initial 
successes to the guiding minds of two expatriated 
Italians. 

The interest which follows the vovasfe of Colum- 
bus is exceptionally increased by a narrative from 
his own hand — the only undoubted original ac- 
count from any of the earliest explorers. It is un- 
fortunate for the interest which the coming anni- 
versary creates, that Cabot himself has left us not 
a syllable of his own. All that we know we get 
by hearsay, and even as hearsay it is scant and in- 
adequate. 

Nevertheless, what John Cabot, a seaman by 
reputation, a resident of England for six or seven 
years, and a man in the prime of life, did for Eng- 
land and for us, we can well understand, if we know 
but little of the way in which he did it. 

There enters into our conception of the condi- 
tions of maritime discovery toward the west, at a 
time when the bruit of Columbus's success reached 
Bristol, vastly more of probability and possibility 
than of accredited fact. That the unknown paths 
of the great western sea had been adventurously 



English Power in North America. ii 

traversed for a century or more, in the north as 
well as in the south, admits of no question. Spec- 
ulative enterprise had repeatedly sought (and Cab- 
ot himself is supposed to have shared in it) a sup- 
posed island lying seaward beyond Ireland. A 
belief in its existence has remained so ingrained in 
the English mind that only in our day has the 
British Admiralty ordered its obliteration from the 
charts. That the fishermen of the Bristol and 
English channels, in the search for fish to meet the 
fast-day diet of the Church, had pushed far beyond 
Iceland in the north, and beyond this supposed 
island in the west, is a matter of record. Whether 
they had discovered the shoals of cod for which 
the Banks of Newfoundland were to become fa- 
mous is a question which we have abundant war- 
rant in raising, and no explicit testimony to solve. 
That such voyages were made in the fifteenth 
century, and before the fame of Columbus marked 
the era, has long been supposed. That even Bis- 
cayan fishermen went there in these early days 
formerly seemed sufficiently so well established, that 
Spain in her diplomacy, more than once, claimed 
that by the acts of such fishermen she placed her 
right to these northeastern shores before that of 
the English. The historian hesitates to discard a 
probability so inherently fixed, as that hardy mari- 
ners of western Europe knew the Grand Banks in 
the middle of the fifteenth century, though no one 
can offer determinate evidence. It is certainly not 



12 Cabot and the Transmission of 

beyond a possibility that some chance development 
may at any time make it clear. 

We may then readily conceive that it needed 
nothing but the report in England of the return 
of the Great Discoverer to Palos, to work in due 
time upon the imagination of a domiciled Italian 
mariner so as to arouse the enthusiasm of advent- 
ure. Zuan Cabotto, living in Bristol, had a spirit 
buoyed by the traditions of Venetian seamanship. 
He had travelled eastward as far as Mecca, and 
had gazed upon caravans returning from the Ori- 
ent. In his birth he was a fellow-townsman of the 
now famous Genoese. He applied for and receiv^ed 
from the English king a patent for a voyage west- 
ward. The date of this license, in March, 1496, 
as well as the letter of Raimondo (first disclosed 
thirty years ago), preclude the recognition of the 
year 1494 as that of the voyage, though it is found 
in contemporary documents, and has been adhered 
to in our time by even such scholars as Davezac. 
It is of much more importance to determine whether 
the mention of Sebastian Cabot's name in the li- 
cense is o-round for assumincr that the son, now a 
man of nearly twenty-five, accompanied the father 
on the voyage, since it is from Sebastian's reputed 
talks with others that we derive such knowledge of 
the voyage as is additional to the slight reports 
gathered by his contemporaries from the com- 
mander, John Cabot, himself 

Unfortunately, there is a growing conviction that 



English Power in North America. I3 

Sebastian Cabot is not a man to be trusted. In 
large part it is because he was accustomed to tell 
different stories at different times, and to talk inco- 
herently. We must never forget, however, that in 
these recitals we are dealing, not with what Sebas- 
tian Cabot said in studied, written phrase, but with 
what other people, not without prejudice, thought 
he said, and affirmed that he did say. The testi- 
mony offen degenerates to a hearsay of a hearsay. 
While it is true that Sebastian's testimony stands in 
constant need of verification, it behooves a careful 
critic of his character to give the old pilot's reputa- 
tion the benefit of some doubt. 

If we believe Sebastian's own words as reported, 
he accompanied his father both on his first and 
second voyages. If we believe contemporary wit- 
nesses, and some are bitterly reproachful in their 
negatives, Sebastian was never on the coast of 
North America at all. The license of the voyage 
in 1497 shows that he and two other sons were 
joined with the father in a permission to make a 
voyage. This does not certainly prove that he or 
the odier sons went. Indeed, in view of the con- 
flicting testimony and eager habit of those who 
sought the royal countenance in such matters, a 
recent writer. Judge Prowse, of Newfoundland, 
has claimed that the insertion of the names of the 
three sons in the license was merely a legal subter- 
fuo-e to keep alive the license to the end of the life 
of^'either ; but it would seem that this was a provi- 



14 Cabot and tJie Transiiiissio?i of 

sion hardly necessary, since the patent of itself, in 
express terms, extends the right of search to the 
heirs and deputies of the patentees. 

More than a year elapsed after receiving the 
patent before John Cabot put to sea, in May, 1497, 
and he was back in Bristol, contrasting- its full 
tides with the scant flow which he found in the New 
World, early in August, so that a period of about 
three months covers his eventful experience. 

We have the names of the companions of Colum- 
bus in his first voyage, and among them we find 
that of a pilot, Juan de la Cosa. The earliest map 
which we have of American waters was made in 
1500 by this man, and he is thought to have de- 
rived what knowledge he showed of the coast 
where Cabot had been, from the reports of the 
Bristol navigator. As not a chart of John Cabot 
has come down to us, this stretch of water " found 
by the English," as Cosa says of it, may stand for 
all that we have in a chart of Cabot's northern 
pioneer experiences. As Cosa's map is the earliest 
drawn delineation which we have of these new dis- 
coveries, so we have the earliest engraved repre- 
sentation in the edition of Ptolemy issued at Rome 
in 1508. That Ruysch, the maker of this other 
map, embodied in his draft of this northern shore 
the experience of Cabot more directly, is to be in- 
ferred from the accompanying text, where it is indi- 
cated that Ruysch was on the Matthew with 
Cabot, and if this was the case, Ruysch's name is 



Englisli Poiver in North America. 15 

the only one known to us of less than a score of 
companions who shared with Cabot the elation of 
that summer morning when they first sighted land. 
It is also held from Ruysch's testimony that in 
leaving Cape Clear on the Irish coast, Cabot swept 
northerly in a course very like, what we in our day 
call Great Circle sailing. 

In the accounts of the voyage of Columbus we 
have courses and distances, and his track can be 
plotted reasonably well on a modern chart. So 
the registrations of his compass and the observa- 
tions of his speed, gauged we must remember by 
the eye only, serve us in the attempt to fix his 
landfall. All such help is wanting when we en- 
deavor to determine the scene of that eventful 
summer morning in 1497. Fifty years ago and 
more the discovery, in Germany, of what is now 
known as the Cabot mappemonde, preserved in 
the great Paris Library, revealed for the first time 
a definite spot for this landfall on the coast of Cape 
Breton. Unfortunately, the map, like almost every- 
thing associated with the name of Sebastian Cabot, 
is a bone of contention, and precisely what Se- 
bastian Cabot's connection with it was, is still in 
doubt. It is a large engraved map of the world, 
bearing on the margins some printed historical 
and descriptive legends which purport to emanate 
from Sebastian himself. A copy of them in the 
handwriting of a certain Dr. Grajales has lately 
been found in Spain ; but it is by no means certain 



1 6 Cabot and the Transniissio)i of 

that this copy is more than a scribe's transcript, 
though it is possible that this Spanish savant may 
have written the legends at Sebastian's dictation. 
Citations of these inscriptions by contemporaries 
vary in places, and this indicates that a document 
now known in but a single copy, may in its day 
have been popular enough to have passed through 
several editions. At the sale of an old library in 
Silesia, a year or two ago, the same legends, set 
with the same type, were discovered in a brochure, 
which luckily found an American purchaser ; and 
this may indicate a further popularity of these rid- 
dle-like inscriptions. 

It has never been necessary to assume that the 
coast lines of the middle of the eighteenth century 
shown on this map, were taken from Cabot's plots 
made at the close of the preceding century, since 
the outlines were certainly taken directly from 
French maps, then recent, and much more de- 
tailed than Cabot's maps could have been. 

Upon this borrowed configuration, at the island 
of Cape Breton, Sebastian had set the words 
Tierra prima vista, as marking the land first seen. 
This explicit testimony has been accepted by such 
writers as Deane and Markham, while others have 
found in the inconsistencies of the map and its le- 
ofends some oround for believine that the landfall 
was placed at Cape Breton merely to pre-empt for 
England the gulf and valley of the St. Lawrence, 



English Poiver in North America. 17 

which Cartier and Roberval had been of late explor- 
ing- in the interests of the French crown. 

Before the discovery of this map, modern scholars 
had, almost without exception, placed Cabot's land- 
fall on the Labrador coast. Their reasons for it 
depended upon Sebastian's reported evidence, and 
upon some other intimations that John Cabot him- 
self may have approved. Here, in this more north- 
ern region, somewhere between the straits of Belle 
Isle and Cape Chudleigh, at the entrance of Hud- 
son's Bay, some scholars, in spite of the uiap^ still 
place the Cabot landfall. The facts, however, that 
the map was well known to Ortelius and others, 
professed geographers, who offered no objection to 
the legends, and that the Cape Breton contact was 
accepted by Michael Lok, in the map which he 
made for Hakluyt, go a good way toward enforc- 
ing confidence in the testimony of the map. There 
is a third belief that John Cabot first struck the 
easterly coast of Newfoundland, and this view is 
naturally embraced by the writers upon that earli- 
est English colony. The fact is that, without further 
light, the testimony on this point is so conflicting 
that there can never be a general concurrence of 
opinion. 

Wherever the landfall may have been, John Cab- 
ot saw no inhabitants ; but he observed traces of 
human occupation in needles of bone and in fish- 
nets. Since the next visitor to these waters, Cor- 
tereal, found silver disks and a battered European 



20 Cabot and the Transmission of 

John Cabot, and authorizing him to make this sec- 
ond voyage, in 1498, supposed the act of posses- 
sion meant anything more than securing, as against 
other Europeans, the right to trade with the deni- 
zens of Cathay. 

It is apparent from the map of Ruysch that there 
had been as yet no suspicion that Greenland was 
otherwise than a part of northwestern Europe, 
neighboring to Asia, as it had long been consid- 
ered. All the north was still a mystery, for the land 
and its inhabitants bore little resemblance to what 
the accounts of Marco Polo had led them to expect. 

The serious question which lay in the minds 
of cosmographers was this : How are Calicut and 
the Ganges, which in the past had been reached 
from Europe by going east, related to this great 
barrier which had been encountered in approaching 
India by going west ? 

The Portuguese, schooled upon a forbidding sea, 
in their search westward for islands, real to them 
and fabled to us, had later opened the African 
route to India. 

Two and three years after the second Cabot 
voyage, these same Portuguese, finding Greenland 
and now judging it to be a point of Asia, and unde- 
termined whether the land west and southwest of 
Greenland was an island or the main, appeared 
under Cortereal in the very region which Cabot had 
pre-empted for the English crown three and four 
years before. 



English Pozvcr in NortJi America. 21 

Coincidently, Cabral, bound with a supply fleet 
from Lisbon for India, was borne westward to 
the BraziHan coast. Thus meeting land unexpect- 
edly, and supposing himself not to have exceeded 
the three hundred and seventy leagues west of the 
Azores, which had been finally fixed upon for the 
line of demarcation, he sent a vessel back to the 
Tagus to report that the coast, which he had 
found, must be on the Portuguese side of the line 
of demarcation. This northeast shoulder of South 
America, protruding so far seaward, was a devel- 
opment that the mind of pope or king had never 
yet dreamed of as complicating the Spanish claim 
to the entire New World. 

There was at once an evident corollary. If 
Cabral had thus secured a segment of eastern 
South America for the House of Braganza, why 
may not Cortereal, now on his way north, ascertain 
if the land there discovered for the English may 
not likewise stretch far enough east to grive the For- 
tuguese crown an equal claim to it, and thus allow, 
a poHtical rival to flank on either hand the Spanish 
possessions in the region of the Antilles ? When 
Cortereal estimated, or pretended to estimate, this 
northeastern coast of North America, he found it, 
as the early Portuguese drafts of the line of demar- 
cation show, within the three hundred and seventy 
leagues west of the Azores, and, accordingly, a Por- 
tuguese possession under the Pope's decision. We 
find in Cape Race to-day the Capo raso of Cor- 



24 Cabot and the Transmission of 

Pert, in [516, those of the Great Livery Compan- 
ies un(^er Henry VIII., in 1521, and of Rut, in 

1527- 

While thiis the territorial claims of England, ex- 
tending- from Hudson's Bay to Florida, . were re- 
maining practically dormant, Fagundez, in 1521, 
was placing the Portuguese flag in Nova Scotia; 
Gomez and Ayllon, in 1521-25, were tracking for 
Spain the shores from the Bahama channel to the 
Gulf of \Iaine. In 1524 Sebastian Cabot, while 
presiding at the Congress of Badajos, had not de- 
murred at the claim of the King of Spain to this 
same coast. In the same interval Verrazano had 
set upon French maps the name of New France 
athwart the broad areas of the continent; and Car- 
tier and Roberval, for Francis I., had delved into 
the land by the waters which proved to be the out- 
flow of the Great Lakes. 

In the year in which Cartier was ascending the 
St. Lawrence, when that exploit became known, it 
alarmed the English, because it jeopardized their 
claim to that region. There was at that time a suit 
in Spain, in which the Crown sought to abridge 
the legacy of Columbus to his heirs. In this cause 
Sebastian Cabot, now transferred to the service of 
Spain, testified that he did not know that Florida 
was connected by a continuous coast with the re- 
gion which he claimed to have visited with his fa- 
ther in 1497 and 1498. This awkward contradic- 
tion is but a specimen of the perverse falsities that 



English Power in NortJi Avierica. 25 

are found in Sebastian Cabot's reported sayings. 
His negative testimony was not accepted and was 
flatly denied by others, as the contemporary maps 
disclose. 

It has been suggested that the apathy of the 
English Government at this time in not pushinp" the 
other western powers by like activity on her part, 
was owing in some part, at least, to the unwilling- 
ness of Cardinal Wolsey. This prelate was too 
ambitious of a seat on the papal throne to risk suc- 
cess by thwarting any projects of the emperor for 
supremacy throughout the western world. 

It has also been suggested, as has be^n already 
remarked, that it was to oft'set the claims of France 
from the Cartier voyage that Sebastian Cabot fal- 
sified the record of his father's landfall by placing 
it at Cape Breton. His purpose was, it is claimed, 
to extend the English right to the water-shed of 
the St. Lawrence by marking in this way the en- 
trance of the Gulf. By the time (1544) he made 
this pretension a part of his great map, he had cer- 
tainly discovered that an unbroken coast extended 
from Labrador to Florida. If one may believe that 
this assignment of a landfall at Cape Breton was 
indeed an act of prevarication, there is nothing as 
yet to show that the legend of pi'i77ia vista had 
any official sanction in England. 

The belief that America was an independent 
continent, which had very early in the sixteenth 



32 Cabot mid the Transmission of 

where recognized. They had Httle community of 
habit, were diversified by cHmate»and foreign amal 
gamations, and they had a scant union of commer- 
cial interests. But there was one commanding 
agency whicli recent advocates of Dutch influence 
seeni to have forgotten. The Eno-hsh common 
law bound together their social life, and gave them 
essential homeogeneousness of temperament, 
which no alien infusion could overcome. They 
were planted upon the soil and nourished upon the 
sea in a way that gave them a country and not a 
sojourning place, as Champlain was grieved to find 
the French were making of the north. Farmstead 
and mill and fishing wear contrasted with the fur- 
laden canoe and the mission-hut of the French. 
Families between the Appalachians and the sea 
grew to the soil, and acres were heirlooms. On 
the St. Lawrence the bedizened savage was a 
brother of the trapper ; the dusky daughter of the 
Huron was the burden-bearer of his camp. On 
the sea the New Englander established his birth- 
right. On the ^yater-courses of the north the Nor- 
man trader and the Jesuit thridded the wilderness. 
Thus it happened that while the stanch barkentines 
of the English colonists were known on the Spanish 
Main and in the Mediterranean, exhibiting a race 
of rugged seamen, the birch-canoe of Montreal v/as 
poled against the rifts of the Ottawa, and broke 
the reflection of the pictured rocks of Lake Supe- 
rior till French erimace encountered not unsuccess- 



English Pozver in North America. 33 

fully the Indian sign language in the innermost 
depths of the wilderness. Whether in the woods 
or upon the ocean, there was no hazard too great 
for either. The French found the portages which 
conducted them to the Mississippi. Two hundred 
years after the Matthew lay to with backed sails 
against the verdured shore of the New World, 
the Galilean priest and explorer were coursing the 
great central valley of the continent, and crossed 
with a rival claim the imagined extension of the 
Enoflish charters. All the while the Atlantic col- 
onists were kept back by the Appalachians, and 
knew nothing of what lay beyond. 

The eighteenth century opened and presented 
the spectacle of the English just beginning to real- 
ize, after a century of colonization, the possibilities 
of the West. It had taken five-score years for the 
true significance of the Cabot discovery to dawn 
upon the English mind. It had required another 
century for that colonization to experience the 
throes of expansion. 

In the early years of the eighteenth century the 
traders of Carolina had pushed along the trails of 
the Cherokees and Chickasaws. In Virginia, 
Spotswood and the famous knights of the Golden 
Horseshoe had glimpsed, as was supposed, the 
great inland waters which the French possessed. 
The New Englanders were pushing aggres'sively 
into Acadia to atone for the fatal incapacity of 
Phips at Quebec. 



36 Cabot and the Traiisviission of 

only made good the seaboard charters in their 
extension to the Mississippi, but had rescued the 
valley of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes 
from French control, and had brought into one 
dominion the vast areas of the eastern half of the 
continent from Hudson Bay on the north to Span- 
ish Florida on the south. 

With the meteor- flag had spread the masterful 
speech of England. Thus it was that a Hudson 
Bay factor, at the trading stations on Nelson River, 
received his orders in the commercial phrase of 
Fenchurch Street in London. Thus it was that 
the Knickerbockers of New York, the Scotch-Irish 
of Pennsylvania and of the valley of Virginia, who 
were also pushing upon the Holston and the Cum- 
berland ; the Swiss and Huguenot of the Carolinas, 
and the Salzburger of Georgia were being indoc- 
trinated with English law, couched in the lan- 
guage of Shakespeare and Bunyan. Over them 
all streamed the same flag;-, which had fluttered in 
the shore breezes upon the little Matthew in 1497, 
and had flaunted in defiance when Drake and 
other west countrymen hung upon the flanks of 
the Spanish Armada. 

From the Treaty of Paris, in 1763, to that which 
recognized the independence of the American Re- 
public, twenty years later, social and political con- 
ditions worked grreat revolutions aloncr the western 
march. 



English Poiver in NortJi America. 37 

A change of allegiance drove some of the best 
blood of the seaboard across the great water-way 
which Cartier and Champlain opened, and along 
which the trade of Duluth and Fort William is now 
seeking a deep channel to the Atlantic. The rigors 
of the war for independence reared twin and manly 
races, that at its close and since have carried the 
same blood westward by parallel ways on each 
side of the boundary of the United States and 
Canada. Time must show if these divided cur- 
rents are bound acjain to form one and the same 
political brotherhood, under a common flag. 

The present century came in and the name and 
fame of Cabot had almost passed from the memory 
of American and Canadian, who owe him so much, 
when the ascendancy of that passion for territorial 
development, which has always been a strain in 
the English blood, wherever it flowed, spread its 
domination to the Gulf of Mexico in treaty-con- 
quests from Spain, and stretched its sway to the 
Rockies, in the acquisition of Louisiana from the 
French. Later still, the war with Mexico opened 
to Anglo-American influences a long stretch of the 
Pacific coast. 

With the transfer of Alaska from Russia the in- 
fluence of the same policy has been extended along 
the sea which Balboa first sighted, from Bering's 
Strait to Santa Barbara, until at last there is 
not a State north of Mexico which now prints its 



38 



English Power in NortJi America. 



sessional laws in any other language than English ; 
and not a political community that cannot join in 
remembering the event which next year we com- 
memorate. 

On the completion of four hundred years from 
that summer's dawn, when the sun dispelled the 
damp and lay the warmth of its beams all the way 
from icy Labrador to coralled Florida, with not a 
Christian soul to greet it, we may well pause to 
scan the portentous annals which have followed. 

Since the Matthew hove to, and John Cabot 
threw the lead and first felt the rebound from 
American land as it trembled along the slackening 
line, a like thrill has been repeated in every new 
sounding of the depths of English power through- 
out this broad continent, from that day to this, 
through four centuries of renown ! 




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